I abandoned the wild places of the mountains and went back to town to look for
a wild thing I had always wanted to see. I had been travelling around the
Andes with a brilliant bird guide named Diego Calderón Franco and we had
seen a series of wonders, especially hummingbirds. On our last afternoon he
asked whether there was anything still on the wish-list. “Macaws,” I said.

“Well, the best place to seem them is the botanical garden in town. They roost
every night in the trees there.” So we dropped back down to Medellín and
waited and, as